Grocery Trend

 We have a trend starting up in Hessen, with a particular grocery operation....Tegut.  HR told part of the story, which I think it will lead to some changes in society.

So presently in Germany....you have two types of grocery operations.  There is the mega store (like you see in Real or Hit, or Globus).  This is a operation of 15k square feet, and will have a lot of items besides food.  Then you have the normal sized shop which is around 5k square feet.....which carries the essentials and a fair amount of beverages (beer, juice, wine, and various waters).  

Tegut decided to test the market system with what I'd call a 'mini-shop'.  Best description?  A modular Quonset-hut sized building....maybe 20 ft wide and 60 ft long.  There will be 950-odd items on 50 square meters of space.  That's about 5-percent of what you'd find in a typical normal grocery operation.

So here's the thing....it's unmanned.  It's open 24 hours a day....unstaffed.  Some truck would drive up once a day....reload the shelves, and tidy up.

You wake up at 2 AM....feeling an urge for something....throw your clothing on, and walk out for two blocks to the 'mini' shop for your urge.

Security?  Well....you have to be a 'club-member'....meaning you loaded an App on your phone, and gave the grocery a fair amount of data....including your payment method.  You come to the door....allowing a scan of the phone data, and they recognize you....allowing entry.  You pick up the five items...scan them, and your App pays the store.

My impression?  Outside of Frankfurt and Wiesbaden....in towns 30 km northward....you find a lot of villages that have lost their local grocery operation over the past two decades.  Same trend for pharmacy operations and banks.  I think these mini-stores would have an appeal and probably prosper in some fashion.  

One odd thing about Tegut in general....if you asked me on 'pricing' which grocery is usually more expensive than the others....it's Tegut.  I'm not saying they are super-expensive, but if you shopped at the typical top ten operations in Germany and bought a dozen-odd things....you will pay 3-to-5 percent more than the majority of shops.  They are picky where they put their grocery operations, and there's typically no real competition against them for at least a mile or two.